BENCHMARK REVISION THREAD! 1/n
I have a feeling we’re going to spend a lot of time on Friday talking about the CES benchmark revision, so here’s a contrarian perspective: IT’S OLD NEWS!!! 2/n
Recap: If you recall, last summer, we got a bunch of alarming headlines about job gains being much weaker than previously believed. Basically, job gains between March 2018 and March 2019 were about 20% smaller than previously believed. This was a genuinely big deal! 3/n 
But the benchmark revision applies to a period that’s now 10-22 months in the rear view mirror. It doesn’t say anything about what’s happened since March 2019 - and we have seen a lot of other data since then. 4/7
If you’re interested in a historical perspective re the job market of the past few years, the revision is certainly informative (though we’ve known about it for 4 months). 5/7
But if we’re interested in the *current state* of the labor market, I’d tune out the benchmark revision and spend more time thinking about what’s happening in the much fresher November 2019-January 2020 data (good or bad). 6/7
One last comment on this topic: we don’t know what the next benchmark revision will do to our estimate of job growth between Mar-19 & Mar-20. We’ll find out this summer. It could be another negative number; but it could easily be a positive number. 7/7
